Decolonizing Methodologies Quotes

“From the vantage point of the colonized, a position from which I write, and choose to privilege, the term ‘research’ is inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism. The word itself, ‘research’, is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary. When mentioned in many indigenous contexts, it stirs up silence, it conjures up bad memories, it raises a smile that is knowing and distrustful. It is so powerful that indigenous people even write poetry about research. The ways in which scientific research is implicated in the worst excesses of colonialism remains a powerful remembered history for many of the world’s colonized peoples. It is a history that still offends the deepest sense of our humanity. Just knowing that someone measured our ‘faculties’ by filling the skulls of our ancestors with millet seeds and compared the amount of millet seed to the capacity for mental thought offends our sense of who and what we are.1 It galls us that Western researchers and intellectuals can assume to know all that it is possible to know of us, on the basis of their brief encounters with some of us. It appals us that the West can desire, extract and claim ownership of our ways of knowing, our imagery, the things we create and produce, and then simultaneously reject the people who created and developed those ideas and seek to deny them further opportunities to be creators of their own culture and own nations. It angers us when practices linked to the last century, and the centuries before that, are still employed to deny the validity of indigenous peoples’ claim to existence, to land and territories, to the right of self-determination, to the survival of our languages and forms of cultural knowledge, to our natural resources and systems for living within our environments.”
― Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples

“History is also about power. In fact history is mostly about power. It is the story of the powerful and how they became powerful, and then how they use their power to keep them in positions in which they can continue to dominate others. It is because of this relationship with power that we have been excluded, marginalized and ‘Othered’. In this sense history is not important for indigenous peoples because a thousand accounts of the ‘truth’ will not alter the ‘fact’ that indigenous peoples are still marginal and do not possess the power to transform history into justice.”
― Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples

“Oral traditions remain a most important way of developing trust, sharing information, strategies, advice, contacts, and ideas”
― Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples

“It appals us that the West can desire, extract and claim ownership of our ways of knowing, our imagery, the things we create and produce, and then simultaneously reject the people who created and developed those ideas and seek to deny them further opportunities to be creators of their own culture and own nations.”
― Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples

“The intellectual project of decolonizing has to set out ways to proceed through a colonizing world. It needs a radical compassion that reaches out, that seeks collaboration, and that is open to possibilities that can only be imagined as other things fall into place. Decolonizing Methodologies is not a method for revolution in a political sense but provokes some revolutionary thinking about the roles that knowledge, knowledge production, knowledge hierarchies and knowledge institutions play in decolonization and social transformation.”
― Zed Books, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples

“Research for social justice expands and improves the conditions for justice; it is an intellectual, cognitive and moral project, often fraught, never complete, but worthwhile”
― Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples

“People, families, organizations in marginalized communities struggle everyday; it is a way of life that is necessary for survival, and when theorized and mobilized can become a powerful strategy for transformation”
― Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples

“There are numerous oral stories which tell
of what it means, what it feels like, to be present while your history is erased
before your eyes, dismissed as irrelevant, ignored or rendered as the lunatic
ravings of drunken old people”
― Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples

“At the heart of such a view of authenticity is a belief that indigenous cultures cannot change, cannot recreate themselves and still claim to be indigenous. Nor can they be complicated, internally diverse or contradictory. Only the West has that privilege”
― Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples

“Imperialism provided the means through which concepts of what counts as human could be applied systematically as forms of classification, for example through hierarchies of race and typologies of different societies. In conjunction with imperial power and with ‘science’, these classification systems came to shape relations between imperial powers and indigenous societies.”
― Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples

“The reach of imperialism into ‘our heads’ challenges those who belong to colonized communities to understand how this occurred, partly because we perceive a need to decolonize our minds, to recover ourselves, to claim a space in which to develop a sense of authentic humanity.”
― Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples

“hooks, bell (1990), Yearning, Race, Gender and Cultural Politics, South End Press, Boston. 13 Hall, Stuart (1992), ‘The Question of Cultural Identity’, in Modernity and its Future, eds H. Hall, D. Held and T. McGrew, Polity Press, Cambridge, pp. 274–316. 14 See Denzin, N. and Yvonna S. Lincoln (2000), ‘The Discipline and Practice of Qualitative Research’, in Handbook of Qualitative Research, second edition, eds N. Denzin and Y. S. Lincoln, Sage Publications,”
― Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples

“The challenge always is to demystify, to decolonize.”
― Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples

“Struggle can be mobilized as resistance and as transformation. It can provide the means for working things out 'on the ground', for identifying and solving problems of practice, for identifying strengths and weaknesses, for refining tactics and uncovering deeper challenges.”
― Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples

“Our survival, our humanity, our worldview and language, our imagination and spirit, our very place in the world depends on our capacity to act for ourselves, to engage in the world and the actions of our colonizers, to face them head on.”
― Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples

“In these conservative times the role of an Indigenous researcher and indeed of other researchers committed to producing research knowledge that documents social injustice, that recovers subjugated knowledges, that helps create spaces for the voices of the silenced to be expressed and 'listened to', and that challenges racism, colonialism and oppression is a risky business.”
― Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples

“The ways in which scientific research is
implicated in the worst excesses of colonialism remains a powerful remembered
history for many of the world’s colonized peoples”
― Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples

“Respectful, reciprocal, genuine relationships lie at the heart of the community life and community development”
― Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples

“Globalization and conceptions of a new world order represent different sorts of challenges for indigenous peoples. While being on the margins of the world has had dire consequences, being incorporated within the world’s marketplace has different implications and in turn requires the mounting of new forms of resistance.”
― Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples

“Imperialism was the system of control which secured the markets and capital investments. Colonialism facilitated this expansion by ensuring that there was European control, which necessarily meant securing and subjugating the indigenous populations.”
― Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples

“The message of decolonization issuing from many writers in the field is that the process of decolonizing can be extremely ‘messy’, often leading to extreme violence; and that in a political sense it can fail miserably, replacing one corrupt elite with its mimics.”
― Zed Books, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples

“It is after all very arrogant of humans to assume a beginning, to name it and set its date, when we are such minor beings in the universe, really only the earth’s caretakers and not its dictators.”
― Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples

“research', is probably one of the dirtiest words in the Indigenous world's vocabulary”
― Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples

“Western education precludes us from writing or speaking from a ‘real’ and authentic indigenous position”
― Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples

“The imperial imagination enabled European nations to imagine the possibility that new worlds, new wealth and new possessions existed that could be discovered and controlled.”
― Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples

“MacKenzie defines imperialism as being ‘more than a set of economic, political and military phenomena. It is also a complex ideology which had widespread cultural, intellectual and technical expressions.’8”
― Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples

“absolute usefulness to those who wielded it as an instrument. It told us things already known, suggested things that would not work, and made careers for people who already had jobs. ‘We”
― Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples